St James Infirmary
by 6cbrilhante
Summary: As our beloved Hugh once said, "Life is the major key and death is the minor key." You have been warned.


Since it was announced about a week and a half ago that Hugh is going to make a concert in Lisbon I've been so excited about it that I felt like I had to write something about it.

Thank you Syd aka partypantscuddy for beta'ing this :)

* * *

**St. James Infirmary**

_Life is the major key and death is the minor key._ – Hugh Laurie

It had all been so sudden that he wasn't even sure that it was happening. Almost 30 years in each other's lives, sometimes present, sometimes absent, had made him forget that this day would have to come sometime. He just had thought, even wished, that when it happened he would no longer be around to witness it.

But he was there, alive, breathing and most of all listening, when Wilson came up to his office and told him. She had just been brought into the ER after a car accident. They had tried to shock her back for as long as they could, but she didn't make it.

In as span of thirty seconds, it was like he was dead too. He even wished that he was, which meant he wouldn't have to feel the pain he was feeling right now, physical and emotionally. But, as he often said and believed, you can't always get what you want. And this time he didn't even know what he needed.

He had just solved another case, saved another life. But he had lost the most important one to him, and there's nothing he could have done to help it.

* * *

When he opened the door of the morgue, he was no longer sure whether it was the same place he had used as a hideaway for years. Tonight the atmosphere had suffered a dramatic change and it seemed almost suffocating, just like the nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide that surrounded him had made a deal with Death and they were trying to take him to the eternal sleep.

When he finally looked up, his gaze rested on her. Lying on the cold table, lifeless, still, bloody and bruised. Despite the bruising and her skin's color starting to fade away, she still looked as beautiful as ever, and it was that moment that he realized that there was a tear threatening to fall down from the corner of his eye, although he didn't make any attempt to try and stop it, neither did he intend to. This had been the woman he had loved with every fiber of his being for God knows how long, and now she no longer existed, she was just another corpse in the morgue with a tag tied around her big toe, a vivid memory of happier times in his always active mind, and a void that could never again be filled in his three-sizes-too-small heart. For a moment he wished, almost even prayed, that he was after all wrong and there was actually some kind of afterlife.

Leaning down, he briefly kissed her now cold lips and apologized for the last time, before turning away from her and, with his heart aching and his thigh burning like hell, he walked out of the room and left what had once been her hospital.

* * *

He sat down at his piano, his fingers wandering all over the keys, just like if he was letting the music cry for him. Before he realized it, he had just finished playing her serenade, the song he had composed for her so many years ago, the song was hers but she had never listened to. Their story, told by the notes that he had played, had now come to an end for sure. This time there was no turning back, only moving forward.

Before he realized it, he had his last ibuprofen pills in his hand. There would be no high like there was with the Vicodin, just fading away in the arms of mankind's most feared secret. Before he realized it, he had taken them all. Looking at a golden watch he had found in some old box in his bedroom, he decided that, if he was going to die, he would die as the diagnostician that he had always been. When he felt it was the end, he looked at the gold piece in his hand and, even if a few seconds too early, he called his own time of death.

In the moment before his eyes closed for the last time, he could have sworn he had seen her right there in front of him, taking his hand in hers.

_I went down to St. James Infirmary  
Saw my baby there  
She was stretched out on a long white table  
So cold, so sweet, so sweet, so fair_

_Let her go, let her go, God bless her_  
_Wherever she may be_  
_She can search this whole wide world over_  
_She won't ever find another man like me_

_When I die, bury me in straight laced shoes,_  
_A box backed suit and a Stetson hat_  
_Put a 20 dollar gold piece on my watch chain;_  
_So the boys'll know I died standin' pat_


End file.
